Pinboy by George Bowering. Markham, ON: Cormorant, 2012. 278 pp. $29.95.

I was late in reading George Bowering’s 2012 book Pinboy, one catalogued for libraries as “biography” and billed by its publisher as a “memoir” in which “Bowering’s youth provides signs of the writer he grew up to be” – i.e. as one which encourages a reader to assume that the narrator, author and protagonist are all the same person. I wasn’t all that curious about my old friend’s adolescence.

On Amazon.ca, however, some readers were not only curious but very concerned about the narrative’s possible authenticity. “I grew up in this little town [Oliver, BC] so could tell the story is authentic,” reader Diana Haynes wrote. Reader Buryl Slack, also from Oliver, believed the narrative should have been even more historical and authentic. “This book was written by the author in order to get revenge, and comeuppance. In some cases he has deliberately semi disguised names and people, in others he has outright named, described and distorted events,” she wrote. Slack seems also to have noticed a few metafictional passages (not her terminology) that subvert the narrative’s implications of truth-telling, but these in her view don’t atone for the distortions. “[E]ven though the author in his garbled fashion of writing this book says a great deal of it is untrue, what he has done is unforgettable and unpardonable.”

One of these passages occurs at the opening to the third chapter, and covertly weakens (a kind of garbling, I suppose, if you miss it) the link between author George Bowering and the narrator/protagonist of the identical name. The narrator is deriding US novelist Jerome Charyn for having described his three-volume memoir as largely written by “imaginative recreation” and the people in it as “characters.” “Well, I don’t have to tell you that I don’t have any power of imagination,” Bowering’s narrator goes on to declare. “I am not recreating any of this stuff. I think it all happened.”

Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 by George Bowering. Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2013.

This is how George Bowering’s 1991 poem “Death” begins:

   I’m going to write a poem about life & death, I said,
   but mostly about death. But you are always doing that, said D,
   your last poem was about death. The poem before that one was
   about death. In fact if you looked at all your writing, especially
   the poems, you would find pretty near nothing but death. A lot
   of the time you seem to be laughing about it, but that doesn’t
   fool anyone. (Urban Snow 23)

Twenty years later in his latest collection, Teeth, he’s still writing poems about death, aging, the slow dying of our planet, and the missed opportunities of a now long distant boyhood, so I guess it’s nothing to worry about. Though it does worry me that he has received such little recognition from the ecopoetry/ecocriticism writers. His “Summer Solstice” (1976) and Kerrisdale Elegies (1984) are two of the most powerful works anywhere of ecopoetry, and written – according to Wikipedia – much before that necessarily death-concerned category was invented.

Being still one who reads poetry mostly for what I can learn about writing poetry, I was attracted most to the unexpected forms in this book – especially to the several poems Bowering has constructed here out of lists of

Edmonton: NeWest Press. 276 pp.  $17.95.

The blurbs for this book – from older writers in the two westernmost Canadian provinces – stress how well-written and “intelligent” the stories are. I wonder whether very many read a book because it is well written or wise. I think most want more – which Love at Last Sight definitely offers. The cover copy also dwells on how allusively literary the stories are, as if that might sell copies. But it’s not the stories that are allusively literary; it’s the young-woman narrators of the stories, usually would-be writers or artists, who are characterized by Thea Bowering as obsessively literary – as drifting in a global world they perceive as having been oppressively and decisively written, written again, and overwritten.

THAT I find interesting: i.e. how can one function as a writer when it seems that all possible writing has already been done? How can one even navigate in a world that seems so overwritten that there is nothing unwritten, nothing outside of literary discourse, to experience? How can one be an edgy writer when the edges seem to have been long ago honed and all the incisive lines inscribed by the famous and recently famous names – Homer, Sappho, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, Flaubert, James, Bakhtin, Yeats, Williams, Woolf, HD, Benjamin, Synge, Orwell, Duncan, Cage, Barthes, Calvino, Derrida, Kroetsch, Berger, Sontag, Blaser – including also one George Bowering, to whom this book is dedicated? So many texts are quoted or incorporated in Love at Last Sight, from all of the above plus numerous texts written, sung or spoken by popular performers, that the collection concludes with nine pages of detailed credits. Nine pages of cheerily disguised anxiety of influence.
 
The title certainly conveys some cynicism – that one loves most at the moment of loss or departure. Most of the characters in these stories are reluctant to invest emotionally in their relationships, as if the already-written and multiply digitized world in which they live has no more promises not only of creativity but also of happy endings or

This past Thursday and Friday I was in Kelowna during the Textual Editing and Modernism in Canada (TEMiC) week-long summer institute. For the graduate students enrolled it was an intense course in “editing modernism on and off the page” – the printed page, the electronic page, and audio recordings – for which they could receive graduate course credit. Because the host faculty at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) is one of “creative and critical studies,” the course also focused on editing as both a creative and critical activity and on the relationship between the creative and the critical. (Myself, I’m not so sure that they are sufficiently separate activities that there can be a “relationship” between them – but that’s another matter.)

To emphasize the links between the creative and the critical, the course was interwoven with a two-day “Poetry Off the Page” event of readings and discussion. The invited writers – myself and George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Sharon Thesen, and Fred Wah (that's us in the cheerful photo, above, by Paul Marck) -- were all ones who had also been editors, worked with early tape-recorded materials, and had produced creative, critical and creative-critical publications. The organizers – Dean Irvine, the director of the Editing Modernism in Canada project, and Karis Shearer of UBC (Okanagan) – tell me that Phyllis Webb, a poet who has created and edited much taped-recorded work for the CBC, was also invited but unable to attend. Poetry off the Page was marked as a kind of  “50th anniversary  of the